In the Margins	Guts, Guns, and Gusto by Aaron Lowinger

smoke truths from your

watery eyes

fathoms waggle off

to delicate jellies

—kristianne meal

In the last five years no community institution has been more important to Poetry City’s poetry scene than Rust Belt Books, the used bookstore at the corner of Allen Street and Elmwood Avenue. On any given night of the week, there’s a good chance that somebody is in the back room of the bookstore reading poems from behind the bug-carved podium with an audience numbering anywhere from five to 50 souls. For readings it is something of a public poetry living room: inviting, unassuming and familiar. And it is for these reasons the space remains in high demand for publication launches, reading series, experimental theatre, film screenings and other community arts events. Fitting to Buffalo’s charm, it revels in its nonofficial-arts-center status rather than whining about a lack of funding or attention. Fitting to Buffalo’s big-heartedness, it fosters community as family, not community as demographics or market base. The spirit of the place is warm, even when the store is not. The books are special and replenish often. The environment is cultivated and tended to by Kristianne Meal, who, with a lot of heart and guts, runs the store like a literary drop-in center. She’s a poet, too. And her poems have guts, guns and gusto. She will be reading with Albany poet Matthew Klane this month in the Just Buffalo Small Press Reading Series on December 13.

Kristianne Meal’s newest book, TwentyTwo (Little Scratch Pad), is a diminutive collection of 22 fragments, scraps, daydreams and emotions; the gray stuff that fills the space between the black and white of the everyday. The poems are tangibly human in their composition; the lines appear jumbled, scattered and sometimes slanted across the page. What seem to be typos become question marks for interpretation. At one point (the poems are untitled, except one) Meal uses a word, “feal,” momentarily calling out the English sound-shape discrepancy minefield in the rhyme of words like wheel, seal, kneel, deal, etc. Without stooping to the level of a wordsmith smartass, Meal knows how to make the “feal” feel real. Her poems make sense in the kitchen, any good home’s conversation hotspot:

whether the bananas

should be sauteed in butter;

would they dissipate?

rather, the bananas

would be seared in butter

In simplest terms, poetry seeks to discover some arrangement of language that is able to express something otherwise impossible to express. More abstractly, it simultaneously draws a frame around that which can’t be expressed. Meal succeeds in indulging the expressible by painting a dotted line around it:

when were we last tangible

to one another?

o yes, i was the rock sun

baking by the sea

and you, the guano of a tern

how we mixed and exchanged-

vapors oils vibrations

saturated permanency

brought on

by wind and sun

us scorched to one

til the tide covered and

swirled your ash away

the moon’s liquid beams

and i beneath

sparkling back at ol’ white eyes

the information of sunlight

of us consummated

zinging

along the canopy

a monkey

In sea foam form is Meal able to tell a two-minute love story without giving away the ending: the imagination’s feast! Yet Meal is able to broadcast an ecstatic signal for all to engage and witness, even a bottom-heavy Buffalo tern. Kristi is a poet of place, this specific place, and a living testament to the power of a pure art space. She is here to furnish the wine, and make the store into much more than a business. While her poems rotate on uncooked human emotion, it’s the tender moments that make one joyful,

say you need a place to live

and i need some one to live with

say it

Matthew Klane is similarly a poet focused on fostering community. Currently active in Albany’s poetry community, he co-edits Flim Forum Press, which is set to release its second anthology in as many years in early 2008. He is also a member of the Buffalo-based poetry collective, House Press. Having previously lived in Boston, Buffalo and rural Pennsylvania, Klane often commutes between the four and beyond in an effort to further broaden relationships and dialogue. As a poet, he is a singular treasure. I am happy we live in the same state.

Klane is a brilliant and prolific writer of mainly serial poems. He composes poems much like a painter, in layers, and maps them into a long poem made up of smaller parts, each of which is endowed with a jarring title like “Professor Oppressor Pops Off,” “The Richard Cory Variations,” “The-West is History,” etc. For each project, Klane devotes himself to gathering notes from several, often disparate texts. The multiple thematic and compositional elements are applied uniformly over the whole of the work. The finished project numbers anywhere from 15 to 250 pages, a piece of which looks something like this:

Pan-Am Anderson Perón

glamour and glory

corresponds

to a throng of Blonde

thinging thongs

[sic]

Klane’s characteristically sharp filtering of speech fragments, pop culture, and the 24-hour news cycle are all on display in this poem, taken from his largest project to date, The Meister Reich Experiments (published online at housepress.org). His Meister Reich poems are anthems of the information age; at once heralding the unbridled proliferation of language in headlines, stories and smut, while exposing its limitations in describing anything germane to everyday experience. Many of the poems, like the one above, employ humor in effort to reclaim some human stake in the matter at hand. The inherent ADHD of the Internet in the form of hyperlinks, RSS feeds and advertising is almost 100 percent linguistic in nature, and Klane is here to thing the thongs out of the surrounding cultural detritus.

One of Klane’s projects from last year, The Associated Press, takes aim at the representation of violence and war in the Western media. Inspired partly by our politicians’ terror-mongering in accordance with election cycles, and partly by actual and potential violence in the Middle East, The Associated Press does its part to remind us again of the linguistic and semantic richness opened by such terrifying and trivializing dialogue. The poem “The-Deep Speaker,” calls out the media-inspired myth-making of you-know-who:

The-Deep Speaker

his brain is a mountain range

his ears are secret caves

his mouth’ breathes in’ a “b”

his mouth’ breathes out’ behemoth

But Klane always manages the other side of blatant misrepresentation by representing the reality of violence. The word behemoth, beyond its colloquial metaphor, recalls the terrifying biblical land-beast. In this poem it is married in myth to bin Laden, yet the myth itself here stands in as an emotive response to the times, not to mention The Times. Klane’s unique poetic response to politics transcends politics and fills out a much bigger picture. It is rare that an artist is able to work politics into his work without letting those politics overwhelm the work. For Klane, the language itself, and his dramatic performance of that language, is always at the fore.

Come for the wine, stay for the bomb. Kristianne Meal and Matthew Klane read their poems Thursday, December 13, 7pm, at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen St.